The project also needs to continue. Do epigenetic marks established during egg development have effects even in mammalian stages? That is a very important question that needs answering, because the answer could have implications on how faithfully our lab model is representing what happens in nature.

Speaking personally, my students have no interest in continuing to use intestines 🤣 ...but I might make them 🤷🏻‍♂️ We will see. I think this is an important conversation for the schistosome community to have.

So, what now? There's a reason everyone works with parasites derived from liver - the intestines are a pain to work with and yield very few eggs. Anything that requires a few thousands miracidia, perhaps even life cycle maintenance, would involve hundreds to thousands of rodents if using intestines.

Our next question was if these differences have effects on miracidia behavior (what we study). The answer is (unfortunately) yes. Most quantitative track features from unstimulated miracidia are different. Aggregated feature summaries show distinct clusters based on tissue origin as eggs.

We wondered - do these differences dissipate over time? Are miracidia transcriptomes synchronized after hatching? The answer is no. Even after hatching and equilibrating at room temperature for a few hours, miracidia transcriptomes can still be distinguished by their tissue origin as eggs.

Well, last year Peterková et al. showed that eggs derived from either the liver (dead end) or intestine (natural migration/excretion route) are transcriptomically *and* antigenically distinct. This was a very important finding. journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

The problem is that the liver is a dead end for the schistosome life cycle. The reason we use liver eggs is entirely due to convenience - they accumulate there in the tens of thousands and hatch to miracidia that can competently infect snails, what's there to lose?

We work with schistosome miracidia, the larval stage that hatches from eggs after being excreted from the definitive host into water. Almost everyone who works with schistosomes use miracidia that were hatched from eggs derived from rodent liver.

Other than myself, ever single author of this manuscript is an undergraduate student. What a blast it is to work these inspiring students.

Along the way, we generated a few models for controlling snail (and thus human) schistosome infections that are completely novel, and we took the first small steps toward that ultimate goal. Seeing the basic biology provide a foundation for new translational approaches has been incredibly exciting.

💻🧬🦟🪱

We have also now added a dedicated documentation website: wrmxpress-gui.readthedocs.io/latest/.

The GUI runs in a browser and is easily installed through Docker Desktop. We've made it easy to download example data from our Zenodo repo, which allows users to see the pipelines in action.

Additionally, the GUI was made possible by substantial updates to the backend by folks in the Zamanian lab (@zamanian.bsky.social). v2.0 is officially out: github.com/zamanianlab/.... It includes new segmentation and tracking algorithms and support for 384-well plates.

The GUI design, code, and testing was done by *undergraduates* in my lab. I'm so proud of them and what they've produced.

We can probably point you in the right direction, depending on your experimental/video setup. Feel free to DM/email.